Lawrence Welsh, El Paso Community College (EPCC) Professor of English, with co-authors, Ray Gonzalez and Bruce Berman, were named finalist for the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award.

A collaboration between El Paso photographer Bruce Berman and poets Ray Gonzalez and Lawrence Welsh, the book, according to critics and reviews, offers readers a way to really look at the border between Mexico and the United States.

Welsh and Gonzalez’s poetry blends wonderfully with Berman’s visual investigations of the everyday realities of the border – detention centers, Smeltertown cemeteries and kids playing along a river levee.

According to critics and reviews, the multilayered histories of the border landscape provide an inexhaustible supply of rich and fertile raw material for the book’s three authors.

In February, the Pima County Library System in Arizona named the book a 2018 Southwest Book of the Year.